I know that my noble friend said that, but he did not respond to the point I made about the evidence which has been provided for us by the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. It says that in many cases the notice is served the day after a person has left the country and that the policy was acknowledged by a senior UKBA official when the matter was addressed at the ILPA AGM in front of 100 people in November 2010. My noble friend did not deny that that evidence existed, nor did he attempt to refute it. If he had said that in the cases where a person’s presence was deemed to be “non-conducive to the public good” the Home Office would not wait until somebody went abroad for a short period, I would have been far happier. The case that he described—where someone is known to be departing from the United Kingdom with the intention of plotting with like-minded individuals abroad to commit or plan further offences against our laws—is, again, hypothetical, but the existence of the suspicions could have enabled the Secretary of State to serve that person with a notice before he left the country. Therefore, there was an element of premeditation in the way that the Secretary of State exercised her powers in the particular case that my noble friend described.
I do not think that we are going to get any further with this matter this afternoon. I shall have to leave it for our colleagues in another place to renew the discussions on both these amendments, as I hope they will. In the mean time, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.